Beat Generation
Their first exposure to Western audiences came through their introduction to the Beats. Painter/folklorist Mohamed Hamri, whose mother was an Attar from the village, led artist Brion Gysin to Joujouka to meet the group. Gysin became fascinated with the group's music and led William S. Burroughs to the village. Burroughs described it as the world's oldest music and was the first person to call the musicians a "4000-year-old rock and roll band". In Tangier, Gysin and Hamri founded the 1001 Nights restaurant, in which the musicians played throughout the 1950s to a largely Western audience in what was then an international zone, the "Interzone" of Burroughs' fiction.
Read more about this topic: Master Musicians Of Joujouka
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